On Oct. 31, Advanced Placement Environmental Science classes went on their first field trip of the year to St. John’s Cemetery in San Mateo to study survivorship curves firsthand.
“Typically we’ve done it with cemetery data that’s online,” said APES teacher Greg Moretti. “This is the first year that we’re going to try it in a real cemetery.”
The goal of the trip was to collect data to calculate birth and death rates from before and after 1900 to graph survivorship curves. Students would then compare these rates and predict the causes of death.
“We’re going to talk about what kind of socioeconomic factors might have affected the difference in survivorship between people born before 1900 and of the people born after,” Moretti said. “For example, we might see the impact the discovery of antibiotics had on survivorship. [Like if] people weren’t dying from infections because they could be treated with antibiotics, we might see a higher percentage of survivorship.”
Each class period took a 10-minute walk to the cemetery and spent approximately an hour recording the information they needed for their experiment from the graves to make their predictions.
“Our teacher [split us into] groups of two and he gave us each a clipboard with two different tables–pre-1900, or post-1900–to fill out,” said senior and APES student Laura Lipton. “[We also recorded] the sex of the person, the year they were born, the year they died and how old they were when they died.”
After coming back to class and analyzing the data, the students noticed some unusual percentages from the data they had gathered.
“Our data wasn’t what we would normally expect,” said junior and APES student Dominic Kudzia. “You normally expect people born before 1900 to die earlier in life because of all the different factors, but it was the exact opposite. We had a lot of people who were born after 1900 dying a lot earlier.”
Students then took their analysis to the next level: trying to predict the causes of the unusual data.
“[The trip] helped us learn about the history of San Mateo,” said junior and APES student Adrienne Nguyen. “We realized it was because the origins of San Mateo come from a lot of rich people. So people had all those resources in the 1800s that [most] people wouldn’t usually have [then]. It made the survivorship curves pretty similar to how they are right now.”
Additionally, the trip being held on Halloween was a strategic choice.
“Our third unit, which covers populations, happens right around Halloween every year,” Moretti said. “And so that’s why I wanted to coordinate the field trip on Halloween day because the timing works out perfectly.
Lipton felt that the timing of the field trip only added to the experience, adding to the Halloween mood.
“It was 100% a 10 out of 10 experience,” Lipton said. “[The graves] make it more spooky.”
Moretti reflects on the field trip and the students’ response to their experience with a more interactive lab.
“I’m sure we’ll be doing it again next year,” Moretti said. “It’s a lot better than sitting in a classroom and doing the internet version of this lab. The students had a lot of fun going up there, we got a little exercise, we got to walk around a beautiful cemetery and we got to collect data.”
The field trip to St. John’s Cemetery is likely to become a tradition for APES classes.
